Mastermind Breakfast Session: Founder Health

Fabrik's Mastermind Monday Series offers a focused setting for personal and professional enrichment. Each session, guided by industry experts and thought leaders, is an opportunity to engage with peers on a deeper level, exchange valuable insights, and set actionable goals. It's a space for mutual growth and accountability, wrapped in a spirit of collaboration. Grab your lunch and get ready to dive in!

​10:00 - 10:30 : Arrival and Breakfast

​10:30 - 11:30 : Presentation & Workshop

​11:30 - 12:00 : Intentional Connection

​Description:

​The most dangerous threat to your startup right now is not a market shift, a competitor, or a broken strategy. It is the part of your brain that still believes you are fighting for survival.

​Every high-performing founder carries the same hidden vulnerability: a nervous system forged for a radically different world. Under the relentless pressure of building a company, that ancient wiring activates and consumes leaders with anxiety. It reads status threats as danger, uncertainty as a physical threat, and pushes us into a chronic state of fight-or-flight. The result is chronic stress dressed up as dedication, aggression disguised as decisiveness, and withdrawal masquerading as strategic thinking.

​I call this the primal trap, which is the dark engine behind individualistic hustle culture. It convinces us that relentless self-sacrifice and reactive emotional responses are the only path to success. It is how smart founders burn out, make disastrous decisions, and watch their mental and physical well-being erode without fully understanding why.

​In this workshop, you'll learn that founder burnout and leadership failures are not a lack of resilience or grit. They are our ‘Ape Brain’ gone wild, controlling us through unexamined unconscious processes that modern grind culture exploits.

​Drawing on sixteen years of research in neuroscience, psychology, behavioral economics, and hard-earned operating experience building companies from the ground up, this session gives you the tools to do what hustle culture actively discourages: prioritize yourself.

​In this workshop, you will:

​Identify your primal triggers: Learn to spot the biological responses that hijack your well-being and critical decisions at the worst possible moments.

​Dismantle the "grind" mentality: Expose the invisible forces driving isolating, individualistic hustle culture and learn exactly how to disarm them.

​Reclaim your resilience: Gain practical, science-backed frameworks for building the one quality that separates enduring founders from those who crash, sustainability. This is the capacity to lead with conscious awareness and genuine self-care.

​We will learn how to be way more productive by rejecting the exhaustive grind, finally seeing the forces that have been shaping you, and deliberately choosing a more sustainable path forward. Lead beyond survival. Take care of yourself, and build something that lasts.

​Session Led by Farzad: ​Farzad is a 3x founder, operator, and executive coach working at the intersection of leadership psychology, AI systems, and company building. He has launched four agentic AI products generating over $1M in revenue and most recently served as Fractional COO and first employee at Humoniq (YC S25), helping raise an $8.5M seed. So far, he has coached 500+ founders and executives, mentored through programs like Intel Ignite Startup Montreal and Nucleate, and is publishing his first book The Primal Trap, a book about how primitive human psychology quietly shapes leadership and organizational success.